Jane Eyre

The orphan Jane Eyre makes her way from a cruel aunt's house to a bleak charity school, and on to Thornfield Hall as governess, where she falls in love with the brooding Mr Rochester and discovers the madwoman locked in his attic. Brontë sets the novel across a real northern England drawn from her own world: the moorland houses and schools of Yorkshire and the Peak, from Lowood's cold dormitories to Thornfield's fire and the wild moors to which Jane flees.

Jane

Gateshead

Childhood

At Gateshead, the orphaned Jane is raised in cold contempt by her aunt Reed and locked, in punishment, in the terrifying red-room where her uncle died. Brontë opens on the powerlessness of a plain, penniless child, and the fierce sense of injustice that will drive Jane's whole fight for a self and a place of her own.

The opening chapters

inspired by Gateshead Hall, the house of Jane's cruel aunt, is a fictional home drawn from the gentry houses of the north; sited in the West Riding of Yorkshire of the setting.

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